o, it was
when he expressed them best that he was least convincing, since an
emotion that can be adequately presented is not a very big emotion; at
least it does not overwhelm the soul. Inadequacy, helplessness,
gaucherie, prove that the feelings are bigger than the eloquence. They
"get across the footlights" between each player on the human stage and
his audience.

Yes, that was it: Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were protesting too well
and too much. Marie Louise hated herself for even the disloyalty of
such a criticism of them, but she was repelled somehow by such
rhetoric, and she liked far better the dour silence of old Mr.
Verrinder. He looked a bishop who had got into a layman's evening
dress by mistake. He was something very impressive and influential in
the government, nobody knew just what.

Marie Louise liked still better than Verrinder's silence the
distracted muttering and stammering of a young English aviator, the
Marquess of Strathdene, who was recuperating from wounds and was going
up in the air rapidly on the Webling champagne. He was maltreating his
bread and throwing in champagne with an apparent eagerness for the
inevitable result. Before he grew quite too thick to be understood, he
groaned to himself, but loudly enough to be heard the whole length and
breadth of the table: "I remember readin' about old Greek witch name
Circe--changed human beings into shape of swine. I wonder who turned
those German swine into the shape of human beings."

Marie Louise noted that Lady Webling was shocked--by the vulgarity, no
doubt. "Swine" do not belong in dining-room language--only in the
platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the
eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his
comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily
correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or
the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too
much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal
"without which." It resulted first as "veetowit veech," then as
"whidthout witch." He made it on the third trial.

Marie Louise, turning her eyes his way in wonder, encountered two
other glances moving in the same direction. Lady Webling looked
anxious, alarmed. Mr. Verrinder's gaze was merely studious. Marie
Louise felt an odd impression that Lady Webling was sending a kind of
heliographic warning, while the look of Mr. Verrinde